Why I am starting to hate Linux.

[Bob Proulx]

Coran Fisher wrote:
> As far as rolling releases are you familiar with Arch, Gentoo, Tumblewood
> (Suse)?  Speaking of systemd at least Gentoo supports bypassing that if you
> wish (I do actually on my Gentoo box). Tumbleweed makes snapshots you can
> roll back right in the boot menu by default last I was running it.

If someone likes a rolling release system, and wants to use a an
excellent init system with it, then I have been enjoying running Void
on my laptop.  Check it out!

    https://voidlinux.org/

Void has been around since 2008.  It is not a new development.  It's
been around long enough to be a mature system platform.  It's also not
a fork of another distribution.  It was independently developed.  Void
uses Runit as the init system.  Runit is based on DJB's daemontools
making it a superior process supervision toolkit.  Initially that was
what drew me to Void.  I came for the init system.  I stayed for the
rest of the very nice system!

It's a rolling release model.  I update my laptop running it weekly
with the newest available stuff.

> yes docker is a useful as well, no reason not to do that.

For Docker containers a popular system is Alpine.  Alpine is a lovely
small system based upon the MUSL libc library instead of much more
behemoth sized GNU glibc and the light weight Busybox instead of GNU
Coreutils.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux

Think small.  Containers based on Alpine can be very small and
efficient.  And it makes a good system otherwise too.  They have a
cool flavor that runs entirely from RAM for example.

Being based upon MUSL though means that one needs to understand how to
drive it.  For example the expectation is that one will always have a
full featured DNS resolver daemon such as dnsmasq or unbound or bind
available rather than having MUSL do the resolving.  Because MUSL only
supports UDP limiting the types of DNS it can resolve.  This means
that people sometimes fall into the pitfall trap of running something
like Postfix or Exim in a container and then find that DNS is not
fully functioning because they did not include a fully funcational DNS
resolver such as dnsmasq or unbound along with it.  Some knowledge and
preparation is needed to run things like this successfully.  But if so
then Alpine is one of the most efficient systems.

Bob